What is she doing this time?
Today a couple of my classmates and I went off in search of a porcelein(??) museum. After about half an hour of walking around and asking different people (all of whom gave completely different directions, of course) we ended up near Beijing's old city wall. We decided to go into the tower, which was now a contemporary art gallery. It is interesting to see modern Chinese art--one of the more interesting pictures was titled "the virgin and child in the forbidden city." There was a park in front of the tower, and the best thing about this park was that it had this sign with pictures of things that were forbidden. There were about 15 different pictures, and the funniest one was of this stick figure sitting with crossed legs on what looked like a fence. However, since there was no fence in the park, we decided that crossing one's legs was the forbidden action. After looking at the sign, we then saw a 3 year old child ride its bike down the path (which was forbidden), then get off and run up to a tree and pick at it (another action that was forbidden). We then saw about three people sitting with crossed legs on a bench. so much for following the rules. The best part about the trip though, was when we asked these two women for directions, they asked us if we were from the Soviet Union.
I just ate this ice cream bar that was vanilla ice cream, chocolate coating, with a pineapple and soy nut filling. Strangely, it was actually pretty good. Ice cream is pretty popular in Beijing, but it's very different from American ice cream. Most of the ice cream seems to be made with soy milk, and the chocolate doesn't really have much flavor. Chinese popsicles though, are much better than American ones, they are more flavorful and less sweet. What really surprised me though, is Chinese yogurt. Instead of milk, lots of people drink yogurt, and it is much superior to American yogurt. It is less sweet, and milder, and very smooth. I drink yogurt almost every morning for breakfast (as opposed to eating sticky rice on a stick). Food in Beijing is really really good, I don't miss American food at all. Dishes in general are much more vineagary and less sweet than in the US, and sauces are thinner than at many American Chinese restaurants. My favorite dish is "fish fragrance eggplant" or "yue xiang qie zi." It's funny, while I've always liked eggplant, it's never been my favorite vegetable. But some how, the eggplant here is amazing (or maybe it's just the fish fragrance).
Beijing is in the Chinese wheat belt, and so people eat a lot of bread and noodle products, especially dumplings and steamed buns. There's even this deep fried bread product that tastes exactly like a cross between a cinamon roll and a doughnut. I bought this bag of purple buns my friend told me were good, however, they tasted exactly like cardboard and were so dense after about two bites it was impossible to eat any more. Much of the food though, is very oily. In general, fresh vegetables aren't that safe to eat (although fresh fruit is perfectly safe to eat, I don't understand) I do miss just plain vegetables. So far, I've had no problems adjusting to the food, and am starting to adjust to drinking tap water, so maybe I will try my luck with at least some vegetables. I'm a little wary to get food poisoning though, after hearing that the boy next door to me started vomiting blood. (I don't know if it was related to food, but still. ick) Luckily, he's feeling better now.
Well, I guess if academia doesn't work out, I can fall back on my second pland of being a farmer in China. This weekend we went to the countryside and stayed in a farming village. We were warned to expect primitive conditions, however, the house we stayed in had two televisions, a computer, a (fairly) modern toilet, a microwave and a refrigerator. 3 of my classmates and I stayed in the air conditioned guest house, and two of our teachers slept in the computer room. We were skeptical that this was a normal farming village, and thought that perhaps it was more a village that it was a tourist village. Our teachers said that because it was in such proximity to Beijing, it was much more modernized than villages that were really in the country. Also, there was a famous "mountain" nearby that was the site of famous buddhist monastery, so the village also prospered from people going to the mountain. The village was indeed beautiful, being simultaneously rustic without rusticity's inconveniences, though it would be interesting to see other villages to know how much of an exception this village was. The food was very good, but our teachers were incredibly offended because they thought it was too simple, and by Saturday afternoon, they were barely on speaking terms with the owners. Friday afternoon, we climbed ying shan, or Silver mountain. For the first time in almost a month, I was finally able to breath fresh air. From the top of the mountain, we could see the layer of smog hanging over Beijing in the distance.
On saturday, we harvested chestnuts, which is done with a very long bamboo pole called a zhu gan, or zhu gar if you have a Beijing accent. You then whack chestnuts on the tree and hope that they will fall off. It was Kind of like hitting a pinata, and lots of fun. While there, I interviewed two people, one man I met in the chestnut (orchard?) who turned out to be a local leader, and one cook at a restaurant. The first man spoke fairly clearly, but the second man had such a thick country accent that I couldn't really understand his answers to anything but the most simple questions. Luckily, a teacher was with me and could help me. I also taped it, but I am really dreading listening to the tapes. I hate hearing myself on tapes in English, and I have a feeling that Chinese is much worse. Also, if I had trouble understanding the speech the first time, I don't see how listening to a scratchy tape will help. T
The best part about the village though, was the big sign painted in red letters on the side of a brick wall that said: "Control population, increase the quality of life"
Saturday night, another student and I went to visit our Chinese host family. They lived in a very modern two bedroom apartment near our school and have a 10 year old daughter. The fed us more food than we could even imagine, including boiled peanuts, grapes, dumplings, and lots of little vegetable dishes. When I told them I was full, they made me drink a glass of warm Coca-Cola (on top of the glass of warm beer I had already drunk).
Sunday, I finally decided to try my luck with a hair cut. The people were very nice, but they really didn't quite know what to do with my hair. First I asked the hair cutter just to cut my hair in a simple chin length style, but he said that wouldn't work. Finally he decided that a perm would be best, to make my hair look thicker. It took awhile to understand, but finally when I realized what he wanted to do, I told him no. After a few minutes of good natured arguing, he finally gave up and cut my hair in a chin length bob. While he was cutting my hair, he asked me what I thought of Osama Bin Laden, George Bush (or Little Bush, as he's called in China) and if hair salons in the US are like those in China. I would have to say, the hair salons in China are better, because when they wash your hair, they give you a free head massage. The whole cost of my hair cut was a little under 4 dollars.
"Hao har xue xi, tian tian xiang shang" (study well, and every day you will improve) -Mao Ze Dong
This weekend we are going to the countryside to spend the night and work on a farm. I am pretty excited about this (I will finally get to see if my secret dream of being a farmer is just a product of communist idealism or if it's actually a viable career choice). However, I'm also a little nervous as well, because I'm going to have to interview a farmer about his or her views on farm life and migration to Beijing. As part of my program, I have to write a 3,000 word paper (du li bao gao--lit. independent report) on a topic of my choice. My topic is migrant workers who come to Beijing to find jobs, which although I am excited about, I feel my language level is not nearly high enough to write a 10 page paper about this topic. I have to interview 5 people, and my teacher thinks it would be good to interview some one in the country (which makes sense). However, not only will I be asking them fairly complicated questions, but people in the countryside have very thick accents, and many don't speak proper pu tong hua (mandarin). It's kind of like a student studying English in England going to the Scottish countryside to interview a farmer.
My original topic was the unequal distribution of wealth in Beijing. The day we were to tell our teachers our topics, I had this one particularly conservative teacher. After I told her, she looked about as comfortable as if I had told her I planned to research her parents' sex life. She kept coming up with reasons why it wouldn't work, such as rich people wouldn't want to talk to me, and finally, she just said that I could try but she didn't think it would work. Even though the vast difference between rich and poor is really apparent even by looking out of our school window, where poor people in rags sleep on cardboard in front of high rise condoes, and peasants with carts of coal bicycle next to Jaguars and BMWs.
It's funny, I really have no idea what is going on in the world. I don't really understand the news, just a few words like I-la-q (Iraq) and I can't read it online. It's strange, internet connections are very fast and most sites down load fairly quickly, but when I try to open up, say, the BBC news online, or even try to look at my blog, it gives me an error page (in Chinese, of course). I used to think it was just maybe a network or connection problem, but now I'm not so sure. It's funny, censorship didn't occur to me, but really, that makes the most sense. Despite all my paranoid thoughts about the evilness of the American administration, I guess I still am pretty used to fairly unlimited access to information, or at least enough to know what is going on or to make up my own mind on an issue. Life in China seems in many ways similar to life in America, sometimes I forget that I am living in a country with a radically different government structure. When my Chinese is better, it will be interesting to see what the news is like. It's kind of strange though to have know idea what is happening at all in the world.
Speaking of news and (American) censorship though, the one thing I did hear is that Osama Bin Laden gave the US government a new video tape, but it was not reported on the American news. Since our teacher told this to us in Chinese, it may not be completely accurate, but still, it would be interesting to know what is going on.
Well, sorry about the long hiatus. I purchased this internet card that was much cheaper than the internet cafe in the foreign student's basement, and I took awhile to arrive, so I have been putting off using the computer. Now however, I have much more time to write (well, at least much cheaper time).
Things have been very busy--every day I have four hours of class, and we have about 80 new vocab words a day. They are very useful, like, "wound that will never heal" and "tears flowing down the cheek." Our text book uses adapted TV scripts, and it seems like many of them come from soap operas. Unfortunately, we haven't learned how to say "melodramatic" yet.
Actually, we are learning slightly more useful words as well, like "Iraq," "no-fly zone," and "missile launch team." It's kind of interesting in our two person discussion class when we have to discuss things like international affairs with the general vocab and grammatical complexity of 5 year olds. At least, I am definitely getting used to only speaking Chinese (or at least a very pidgin version of it--we have our own version of Chinglish used in the dormitory, but people give us very strange looks on the street. I guess I would think it strange as well if I saw a bunch of foreigners only speaking a language that they were clearly not fluent in)
Besides school work, I have signed up for a dance class, calligraphy, singing, cooking, and tai chi. So far we had the dance class, which is actually Uygur dancing. Despite the overwhelming ratio of males to females, the class was all female (not a big surprise). It is really interesting, but very different, I think it will take a while to be able to get my body to move in that way.
Calligraphy class was a disappointment, it was taught by one of my teachers who is very quiet and constantly seems embarrassed, and I almost fell asleep. Singing class is really fun, we are singing both current and traditional folk and pop songs. One song we will learn is "The East is Red." I can't wait.
Last weekend we went to the great wall at Si Ma Tai, which is the least touristy part of the wall open. In fact there, weren't all that many people there at all--only some Chinese people having picnics and the occasional Australian and of course, German tourist. It was beautiful, decrepit, and much steeper than I imagined. The view was great and would have been more stunning if it weren't for the ubiquitous pollution; mountains in the distance were almost completely blocked out. (Today the pollution was so bad, it was like a thick fog, and looking out from the classroom, we could barely see the buildings across the street.) But anyways, at Si Ma Tai this elderly woman followed me the whole way, and at any really steep part, she grabbed my arm to help me, even though I protested. She also told me about the history of the great wall, and I was torn by my urge to be polite to this raggedy elderly woman and my annoyance that she wouldn't leave me alone and would probably demand money. Even though I tried to refuse, she gave me two apples, and sure enough, afterward she tried to sell me a book for 100 kuai (12 dollars) eventually, she halved the price, and I felt obligated to buy it, but was still really annoyed--after all, I told her repeatedly I didn't want her help. At the same time though, she does need the six dollars more than I do, and at least I have a book and two apples. If you ever go to China and to the great wall
It has been a harrowing two days, but today my roommate and I FINALLY fixed our curtain rod. After realizing that we had actually and truly broken the curtain rod (aka some faulty sautering job snapped) and we were stuck trying to attach two metal parts together, we bought super glue. (After about 15 minutes and a good laugh by the people in the hardware department, they finally figured out what I wanted). The glue came tantalizingly close to working, but wasn't quite strong enough and was too brittle. Our curtain rod holders had two parts, one screwed into the ceiling and then attached to this other cup-like piece that held the actual rod. However, the screws weren't screwed in straight meaning that the rod was slightly twisted, so while we could get the whole thing together on the floor, the screws no longer lined up with their holes and two parts would snap when we tried to screw the it back into the ceiling.
We decided to run twine through the two parts to hold them together, so after looking up 'twine' in my trusty dictionary, I went back to Wan Hui, our amazing supermarket that is similar to Fred Meyer's (to those of you who know what Fred Meyer's is). Unfortunately the word that supposedly meant "twine" actually meant "cord" and after much more confusion and amusement (on the part of the actually very nice people in the hardware section), I ended up with this pink plastic raffia-type substance. Surprisingly, that also almost worked, but the problem was while one set had a hole all the way through, the other side had a thin layer of metal to which the cup had been attached. The "twine" was too stretchy anyways, so we decided to run a bolt through and secure it with nuts and some how deal with the metal.
Meanwhile, we really didn't want the (incredibly nosy but friendly) fu wu yuan (cleaning lady) to see the broken curtain rod on our floor and charge us some outrageous fee, so we hung the do not disturb sign on the door. My roommate is often sick, so our guise worked well when the cleaning lady approached me in the hall with this very serious look and asked if my roommate was very sick, and I told her yes. Of course, about 30 seconds later, my roommate comes bouncing through the door (coughing, but clearly not on her death bed). Oh well. The nut and bolt idea worked well on the one side, but it meant we had to break the metal layer on the other side to be able to run the bolt through, so we borrowed this guy's lighter and a heavy pair of pliers. We used the lighters and a chopstick to soften the metal and then using the pliers as a hammer hammered a screw through. After a lot of effort (and strange looks by people passing by our window) we got it to work. It was almost perfect. but the screw head slipped through the other side. My roommate chewed some gum to use to make the hole smaller. Finally however, we wrapped it in a layer of duct tape and punched the bolt through, making a snug fit. After another half hour of wrestling with it, we got the curtain rod back up looking as it had before.
Aaaahh... now I can finally concentrate on things like homework and not worry about huge fines and the wrath of our dorm's beauracracy. And I can put away all my (semi) clean and dry clothes that I had put around the room to dry and which had made our room this really uncomfortable damp but cool (because of the air conditioning) and extremely messy place to live.
Today is the first Sunday before classes, and I already have a lot of homework I need to be doing. On Friday, they gave us almost 150 vocabulary words and two lessons to cover. We are using an easier book for this first week, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds, but I definitely need to get cracking on memorizing the new words. It's also harder because I have studied traditional characters, and everything here is in simplified. Most words are at least similar enough to figure them out, but most of the common words are different enough so that I can't recognize them. Right now I'm stuck feeling kind of silly asking my roommate if she can tell me what "buy" and "to" look like. I'm worried that even if I recognize a word, I won't be able to write it, and it's hard to know if a word is a genuinely new character or just in a simplified form I don't recognize.
On another note, today my roommate and I broke our curtain rod trying to dry our laundry. We had tied our clothesline around it, but our clothes were too heavy, so the rod fell off. I bought some superglue at the store, I hope it works, because I really don't want to have to pay any repair costs.
We had our first class meeting today. There are only 8 students in 3rd year, and I am the only girl. We have 5 teachers, so it makes it a ratio of almost 1:1. It is kind of funny hearing how first we will meet as a "big" class and then split up into smaller and smaller groups. 4th year only has 3 students though. It's funny, there are 8 girls and 19 boys in my program. Considering back at home, there are about 10 girls and only 3 boys, I didn't expect this lopsided ratio. I wonder if SARS has anything to do with it, but I don't know what that relationship would be. Maybe parents are more overprotective of females than males?
Today I went to the university quarter to have dinner and look around. That area is on the other side of Beijing, and although a girl spent last summer there, she didn't really know how to get there. We ended up taking the subway and a taxi, who overcharged us by 6 kuai (RMB) I was really upset (and in a bad mood anyways) even though it comes out to 75 cents, and split three ways, it means I had to pay an extra 25 cents. It's funny that you can get ripped off by quite a lot (for being in China) and still barely spend any money at all. Coming home, we took the brand new subway line loop, which goes past the Olympic stadium out to the not yet constructed 5th ring road. We went the long way thinking it would be faster, not realizing the size, so it took almost an hour and a half. Oh well, it was kind of interesting to see Beijing's desolate suburbs, even in the dark.
Today we had our placement exam, which I was kind of worried about, because I did not study any Chinese this summer at all. When I got here, my Chinese was quite rusty, and although the speaking is slowly coming back, some how a couple of days of cramming didn't seem to be the best way to relearn about 500 characters. The test went okay with the written part was harder than the oral. I have been placed into 3rd year, which makes me very happy,. There are 7 other kids in third year, which I think is a good size. My text book is called something like, "multimedia china" which sounds interesting but is probably deadly dull like all other texts books.
Other than that, my days have been a combination of fascination and boredom. Going out into the city is really interesting, and almost everything seems exciting, which will probably wear off when I am more familiar with the city. Today we went to this some what seedy and somewhat touristy street full of antique shops, which were really beautiful and interesting none the less. This woman on the street was selling (among other things) orginal Little Red Books and the most kitschy Mao alarm clocks, and I think I might go back and buy one when I figure out what sort of price would be reasonable. She was very nice, and I talked to her for awhile. It's funny, I thought speaking to strangers would scare me, but I kind of like it. They are all really really polite and friendly.
Two nights ago we went to the night market, where they sell everything that could possibly be eaten on a stick (probably even civet. I asked the director here if SARS really started with civet, and she said it was a lie). I bought a mutton shish kebob sprinked with MSG and grilled from some Uygur men at a stall. It was really good, and I didn't get sick or have a reaction. I heard that MSG in China is natural MSG and not as bad for you, but I have no clue if it's true.
Other than making trips, there is not very much to do. I brought one book for the plane and already read it, and other than that I have nothing to read. I still can't understand television well enough to really watch it, so really there isn't much to do besides sleep or try to watch TV (I mainly like the commercials)
